This is an anti-pattern that seems to be becoming more widely used lately. This is also something that is very simple to avoid.

I'm using an app called NVision as an example here (which is otherwise a pretty nice app). This app shows notifications for new stories by default (which I think is the wrong default but that's not the point of this post). The problem is that when I tap the notification I'm taken to a screen saying "loading content". This should not happen! If your app notifies that there's a new content that content should be instantly accessible by tapping the notification without any loading screens or splash screens.

Bottom line: don't show a notification about new content until that content is finished loading so you can show it to the user without any delay.

I'm not sure I completely agree. If the size of the data is small enough, sure, download it locally before generating the notification. If the size is significant, it seems to make sense that it should only be downloaded after the user expresses interest by selecting the notification. I'm not trying to be contrarian or anything, it's just that bandwidth is often a limited resource on mobile devices.﻿

+Riley Brewer agreed. But the app should probably show whatever data it has loaded. e.g. if it's only loaded a post title and timestamp, it should show the post title and timestamp immediately in the activity layout, and then populate the post body and images when those are loaded. And it goes without saying, this should all be cached :)﻿